One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley interviewed a star of two-reel comedies, “bright-eyed little sprite” Dorothy Devore. She had just finished up a five-year long contract with Christie Comedies, and she was trying something new: live theater. However, she wasn’t deserting comedy: she was starring in a farce with music called The Morning After by C.A. Newton. She told Kingsley that making comedy shorts had turned her into something of a menace:
See the author and director over there talking seriously about the play? I’m just dying to go and pour a bucket of water over them to start things going. That’s what they do in a comedy.
Why, we screen comediennes aren’t safe to be left at large! I can’t even see a man cranking a car in the street without wanting to push him over on his face, and when a painter at our house was climbing a ladder this morning I could just see him dangling and kicking if I pulled the ladder out from under him.
Nobody else has mentioned this side effect of comedy stardom. She also talked about the difference between the kinds of acting: she found that rehearsing for the stage was much slower than making movies, and there was too much standing still and delivering your lines. She said:
On the screen you are glancing at ten places and jumping a wall to get your message across. If only they’d let me do a couple of flip-flops in the middle of my lines I’d be happy.
It seems like you can take the woman out of slapstick but you can’t take the slapstick out of the woman. Anna Inez Williams* was born on June 26, 1899 in Fort Worth, Texas, joining three brothers and a sister. Their father Thomas Williams was a blacksmith and mother Lussie Percifield Williams looked after their home. Her parents got divorced in the early 1900’s and Lussie went to work in an overall factory.
In 1920 Devore told film writer Hazel Shelley about her early years and how she broke into the entertainment industry. When she was 11, her mother decided to leave Texas and take her to Los Angeles for her health (the older kids had already left home). Devore sang at school and in her church choir, discovering she had a big voice in a tiny body. She “caught career fever” and after school every afternoon she sang and danced in amateur shows. To hide from her mother, she needed a fake name, so she picked Dorothy from Robert W. Chambers horror books and Devore from Snappy Stories magazine. She didn’t tell her mother until she got a job singing and dancing at a popular Los Angeles café, Levy’s. She said this led to being hired by the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, which planned to bill her as “The Miniature Pocket-Edition Sophie Tucker.” Instead of touring, she was hired by comedy team Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran in 1918 and broke into the movies.**
She usually played one of the team’s wife or girlfriend. Her film debut was in The House Cleaning Horrors (1918), in which she was Eddie Lyons’ wife. They hire Lee Moran to paper their walls, and messiness ensues.
She made twelve shorts with them. Moving Picture Weekly described the final one, Marry My Wife. She played Edith, who was engaged to Eddie, but she refuses to marry him because married couple Lee and Lucy are quarreling, which makes marriage look like a bad idea. Then there are misunderstandings and jealousy, but both partners end up with their original significant others.
Later that year she was hired by the Christie Company. During her five-year contract there she usually played a daring young woman who gets herself into and out of trouble. Grace Kingsley liked them; in January 1924 she said that Navy Blues was an “an oasis in the great laughless Sahara of ‘super specials’” and a “bright little laugh-pager.” The plot involved Devore disguising herself as a sailor to accompany her groom on his ship and Kingsley called her “that sprite-like vivaciously illustrative and wholly clever little elf of a comedienne.”
In April 1924 Kingsley had reported that Devore had finished her contract with Christie and she planned to freelance, because she wanted to “have a chance at something besides the black-and-blue drama.” She said she hoped to be a real actress. Back in January, Kingsley had predicted this would happen and said, “but in the meantime she remains to charm and soothe the eye and delight the senses… May she never be wasted in the tear-teasers!”
However, instead of going right to another movie company, she decided to try something new: the legitimate stage. Kingsley’s interview with her ran just before The Morning After opened at the Mason Theater. L.A. Times entertainment writer Kenneth Taylor reviewed the play and he thought she was the best thing about it, adding:
we may soon be able to count this young comedienne as one of our foremost stage personalities…It is Miss Devore who saves the show when the action lags, or the situations become too obvious.
He really didn’t like the rest of it, and thought the story of interwoven mistaken identities was the type found in the “cheaper burlesque houses.” He recounted the plot:
The heroine’s girlfriend, a widow, agrees to marry her dead husband’s brother, whom she has never seen. Her father-in-law arrives with the young man as the heroine arrives with a fast boy friend, the aftermath of a party the night before. To avoid creating an unfavorable impression, the fast boy friend is introduced as the heroine’s husband about the same time the heroine is meeting, falling in love, and marrying the young man intended for the widow.
It doesn’t sound like a lost gem! Taylor concluded that three or four re-writings and some actual directing were needed. He wasn’t the only one to pan it; Variety agreed that it had “a most conventional skein for a plot and is deluged with motion picture ‘hoke,’ gags and situations, besides being devoid of any human appeal.” Their reviewer thought that Devore tried hard to put it over, but thought she’d be “seen to better advantage if placed within a comedy talking and singing vaudeville turn.” Nevertheless, he found her voice pleasant and her singing soothing.
Even though it seems she wasn’t the problem with the play, Devore decided to return to the movies. She made one film, The Tomboy, for the Mission Film Corporation, then she got her wish to be a dramatic actress, signing a contract to star in features for Warner Bros.
However, that didn’t work out the way she had hoped it would. She was already complaining about the roles she got there in 1925 when she was interviewed by Doris Denbo for Picture-Play Magazine. She said: “Here I am seriously playing just the sort of ingénue roles that I used to burlesque. I have no sympathy with such characters.”
So it wasn’t too much of a surprise that in 1927 she returned to making comedy shorts for Educational Films. In a 1928 article about her Alma Talley of Picture Play Magazine wrote “she has the common sense to realize that she’s better off being herself in two-reel comedies, even with a few stray custard pies, than being the heroine of feature pictures.” Talley quoted Devore: “No one wants to see me cry, and I don’t blame them. I don’t care about seeing myself cry.” She also mentioned that her fan mail had dropped off when she tried serious roles.
At Educational, Devore had her own production company, Dorothy Devore Comedies. She stayed there until 1929. She starred in one more feature, Take the Heir (1930) with the small company Screen Story Syndicate, then stopped making films except for a short appearance in Miracle on Main Street (1939). It might not have been only the coming of sound that ended her career. In August 1928 she had brought a suit against the Kreliberg Pictures Corporation of New York for breach of contract, after they reneged on an agreement to pay her $1750 to play Kitty in The Little Girl God Forgot. She won the suit, but it could have frightened off other employers.
She kept busy after her film career. On December 18, 1925 she had married Albert Wylie Mather, the managing director of Consolidated Amusements which ran several movie theaters in Honolulu, Hawaii. He worked in Hollywood for awhile—the 1928 interview mentioned that Mather was the new general manager of James Cruze’s film unit, and he was on a leave of absence from his work in Hawaii. After she quit films they moved back there. She divorced him on grounds of cruelty in August 1933. At first they kept their disagreements out of the paper, but in 1935 he sued her to get the divorce settlement back, demanding the return of $100,000 worth of cash, stocks, and real estate. During their court testimony they both accused each other of having affairs. She won, but six months later she had to ask the court enjoin him from continuing to attempt to get the property back.
She didn’t marry again. In the 1940’s she owned a dress shop in Hollywood, and only turned up in the Times when she got arrested for drunk driving after a minor accident in 1946. She paid a $50 fine after pleading guilty. In 1966 she moved into the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills after two strokes, and in 1973 she told an interviewer “I am very contented, very happy here.” She spent most of her time sewing. She died on September 10, 1976.
If you’d like to see one of her shorts, Niles Film Museum has made Kidding Katie available online.
*This is a picky detail, of interest only to other researchers. Despite what some other sources say, I think Devore’s birth name was Anna, not Alma. Not only was it what she told Shelley in 1920 for Motion Picture Classic, but in her first appearance in the 1900 census records she’s called Annie Inez Williams, and on a boat passenger list from Hawaii in 1922 she called herself Anna. In 1946 she told the court that her legal name was Anna. Finally, when Anthony Slide spoke to her in 1971, she told him her name had been Anna.
I can understand how earlier researchers might have been confused, because in January 1900 another little girl named Alma Inez Williams was born in Texas to David and Georgia Williams. She lived her life in Texas. Unfortunately, this is a problem in all kinds of history writing, not just film history: a “fact” gets repeated, and nobody double-checks.
**In later interviews, she said she had done a vaudeville tour, but her earliest interview was probably more truthful. Before she was hired by Lyons and Moran, the only mention in the entertainment press of a Dorothy Devore was a wrestler.
“Actress Battles Former Husband’s Suit,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1935.
“’Bubbly’ Jag Costs Actress $25 Per Pint,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1946.
Doris Denbo, “The Versatile Dorothy Devore,” Picture-Play Magazine, August 1925, p. 83.
“Devore Suit Goes Over for Trial,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1928.
“Dorothy Devore Booked as Drunk,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1946.
“Dorothy Devore in Plea to Have Ex-Mate Cited,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1935.
Jimmy Fidler, “In Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1942.
“Film Queen Unaware of Nuptial Day,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1925.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes: Comedy Whirls Along,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1924.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes: Will Free Lance,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1924.
“Marry My Wife,” Moving Picture Weekly, January 25, 1919, p. 43.
“Miss Devore Wins Battle,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1935.
“Morning After Tame,” Variety, May 21, 1924, p. 14.
“One Man’s Dream Became Home for Actors,” Hartford Current, August 18, 1973.
Hazel Shelley, “The Diminutive Dorothy Devore,” Motion Picture Classic, December 1920, pp. 34-5, 71.
Anthony Slide, Silent Players, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
“Suit to get Salary Won by Actress,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1928.
Alma Talley, “A Twinkling, Twinkling Little Star,” Picture Player Magazine, February 1928, pp.23-24, 112.
Kenneth Taylor, “Dorothy Devore in Stage Debut,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1924.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 
What an interesting actress … about whom I knew nothing. Thank you for all this!
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Thanks for reading, Dorothy!
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Very interesting. The top photo is Marguerite de la Motte though.
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Oh my goodness, thank you for the correction. I’ll fix it.
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